Gabriele Picco

Le Case D’Arte, Milan
Through April 28

Prior to producing this latest series of work on display in Milan, Italian artist Gabriele Picco spent three months in New York. Two large-scale canvases document his relationship to the New York art world. Hot Dog at Guggenheim affords Picco’s sarcastic response to finding an exhibition of Armani’s couture at this prestigious museum. In perfect art world bad-boy style, he sets an image of autoerotic pleasure before the seductive outline of the museum: a naked woman finds the means to satisfy her—rather improbable—sexual appetite with a hot dog. Does Picco wish to imply, perhaps, that in a space devoted to art, sex is a preferable subject to fashion?

In Self-portrait with N.Y. Art Galleries, the artist’s approach is not as lighthearted: Picco’s naked body becomes a living map covered in wounds, each of which represents the name of one of New York’s most prestigious galleries. Perhaps what we are looking at here are the artist’s crushed hopes or possibly evidence of an objective difficulty in making his mark in such a highly competitive context.

An entire wall of the gallery is devoted, on the other hand, to exploring the relationship between Picco and New York City, through twenty drawings and various papers transported directly from over the pond. Picco’s jumping off point for this piece was a difficult experience that he actually lived through: apartment hunting. “Room 4 Rent” notices—photocopies that have faded, been torn up, and rendered curious mementos by the comments and telephone numbers scribbled on them—are stuck randomly here and there to furnish the background to twenty small drawings.

Titles of pieces such as Fucked home, My pocket home, and No house but I have a poem obviously refer directly to the theme in question, yet all the works in this section are lightening quick, irreverent thoughts rapidly traced onto paper, which struck the artist while he went about the city. The works are impromptu digressions and free associations that the artist has taken and rendered captivating. Although at times angry and impulsive, it is the immediacy and commentary elements of Picco’s work that now provides the most plausible justification for his impetuous visual language, rightfully free from meditative censure.




Milovan Farronato
Translation by Rosalind Furness